Eutaw Springs: The Final Battle of the American Revolution's Southern Campaign

Summary

The Battle of Eutaw Springs took place on September 8, 1781, and was among the last in the War of Independence. It was brutal in its combat and reprisals, with Continental and Whig militia fighting British regulars and Loyalist regiments. Although its outcome was seemingly inconclusive, the battle, fought near present-day Eutawville, South Carolina, contained all the elements that defined the war in the South. In Eutaw Springs: The Final Battle of the American Revolution’s Southern Campaign, Robert M. Dunkerly and Irene B. Boland tell the story of this lesser known and under-studied battle of the Revolutionary War’s Southern Campaign. Shrouded in myth and misconception, the battle has also been overshadowed by the surrender of Yorktown

Eutaw Springs represented lost opportunities for both armies. The American forces were desperate for a victory in 1781, and Gen. Nathanael Greene finally had the ground of his own choosing. British forces under Col. Alexander Stewart were equally determined to keep a solid grip on the territory they still held in the South Carolina lowcountry.

In one of the bloodiest battles of the war, both armies sustained heavy casualties with each side losing nearly 20 percent of its soldiers. Neither side won the hard-fought battle, and controversies plagued both sides in the aftermath. Dunkerly and Boland analyze the engagement and its significance within the context of the war’s closing months, study the area’s geology and setting, and recount the action using primary sources, aided by recent archaeology.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN 978-1-61117-758-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-61117-759-6 (ebook)

Front cover illustrations: (top) Battle of Eutaw Springs, 1857, engraving by Irving Washington, and (right) Nathanael Greene Major, engraved by J. B. Longacre from a drawing by H. Bounetheau, courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections; and (left) Eutaw Creek downstream from big spring, courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Dedicated to Al Boland, whose love of military history was the inspiration for this book

To the Memory of the Brave Americans under General Greene, in South Carolina, Who Fell in the Action of September 8, 1781

Phillip Freneau

At Eutaw Springs the valiant died,

Their limbs with dust are covered o’er.

Weep on, ye Spring, your beautiful tide;

How many heroes are no more.

If in this wreck of ruin, they

Can yet be thought to claim a tear,

Smite your gentle breast and say

The friends of freedom slumber here.

Thou, who shalt trace this bloody plain,

If goodness rules thy generous breast,

Sigh for the wasted rural reign,

Sigh for the shepherds, sunk to rest!

Stranger, their humble graves adorn,

You too may fall and ask a tear,

’Tis not the beauty of the morn

That proves the evening shall be clear.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter One — Commanders and Personalities

Chapter Two — The War in the Carolinas and the March to Eutaw Springs

Chapter Three — First Encounters

Chapter Four — The Battle Develops

Chapter Five — British Resurgence

Chapter Six — Aftermath

Epilogue

Appendix One — Battlefield Archaeology, Preservation, and Tour

Appendix Two — Unit Strengths and Losses, Officer Casualties, and the Return of the Army

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

Gen. Nathanael Greene

Southern campaign map

Relief map of South Carolina

British and Colonial troop movements

Geologic map of Eutaw Springs and vicinity

Stratigraphic column from the Pregnall No. 1 Corehole

Macrofossilferas Santee Limestone

Eutaw Springs, circa 1859

Eutaw Springs circa 1938

Large spring, summer 2005

Eutaw Creek downstream from big spring

The River Road

The sweet potato field

Historic creek photograph

John Eager Howard

Washington’s cavalry flag

Lt. Col. William Polk

Lt. Col. John B. Ashe

Maj. Reading Blount

Lt. Col. John Harris Cruger

Col. Otho Holland Williams

Lt. Col. William Washington

Lt. Col. Henry Lee

William Washington monument

Brick House ruins

Maj. John Marjoribanks’s grave

Daughters of the American Revolution monument

Pvt. Paul Stroman’s grave

Pipe banner

Maps

Battle map 1: Opening Positions

Battle map 2: The Militia Advance

Battle map 3: The State Troops Engage

Battle map 4: The Continental Troops Engage

Battle map 5: The Americans Advance

Battle map 6: American High Tide

Battle map 7: American Withdrawal

Map 8: Tour route map

Preface

Who won? On September 8, 1781, a revitalized American army under General Nathanael Greene launched a surprise attack against a makeshift British force under Colonel Alexander Stewart. After several hours of intense combat, Greene broke off the engagement and withdrew. Many controversies remain from the Revolutionary War battle at Eutaw Springs, and this section will explore each of them in greater detail. A review of the sources used will highlight the difficulties in reconstructing the actions of September 8, 1781. Ironically the most enduring point of contention is over who won the engagement.

If the battle had ended when the Maryland and Virginia Continentals made their assault, there would be no question that this was an American victory. These troops swept the field, brushing aside the exhausted English troops and scoring hundreds of prisoners. The British artillery and camp fell into their hands.

Yet here the battle stalled, as the Continentals encountered the Brick House and Maj. John Marjoribanks regrouped at the palisaded garden. Looting, exhaustion, and a breakdown in leadership on the Continentals’ part, and hard work by Col. Alexander Stewart, Maj. Henry Sheridan, Bvt. Maj. John Coffin, and Marjoribanks to rally their men, turned the tide. The British counterattacked and pushed the Americans back for good. At this point Gen. Nathanael Greene broke off the engagement, as he related in the letter to the Continental Congress he wrote three days after the battle:

Washington failing in his charge on the left, and the Legion baffled in an attempt upon the right, and finding our infantry galled by the fire of the Enemy, and our Ammunition mostly consumed, tho’ both Officers and Men continued to exhibit uncommon acts of heroism, I thought proper to retire out of the fire of the House and draw up the Troops at a little distance in the Woods, not thinking it adviseable to push our advantages farther; being persuaded the enemy could not hold the Post many Hours, and that our chance to attack them on the retreat was better than a second attempt to dislodge them, which, if we succeeded, it must be attended with considerable loss. We collected our Wounded, except such as were under the command of the fire of the House, and retired to the ground from which we marched in the morning.¹

Stewart recalled that he was too weak to pursue and that during the fighting his army was nearly routed beyond recovery. He wrote to Lord Cornwallis: I assure you the Action was bloody and obstinate, and had I not my self rallyed the left wing of the Army, carried them on and exposed myself much the consequence to my little Army I believe every one allows might have been fatal. He lamented not having Cavalry to profite of the totall rout of their Infantry when the Americans retreated. Lt. Hector Maclean of the Eighty-Fourth Regiment concurred that the British lacked enough cavalry.²

The Americans did net several hundred prisoners and pushed the British back, yet they did not break Stewart’s army or drive them from the field. Stewart’s troops were too weak to pursue and barely held on. A clearer example of a draw could not be had. For months afterward both armies spent their energies on recuperating from this exhausting battle.

Numbers and Losses

Historians also still debate the numbers of prisoners each army gave up and the losses they endured. Exact troop strengths are also in doubt. The present work used the reports of the opposing commanders to produce the numbers presented. Fortunately the returns for both armies exist to aid historians. According to surviving reports, the American army’s strength was 2,080 men, and the British had 1,396. When looking at the numbers, it is important to remember that the rooting party sent out by Stewart included about three hundred men, who must be subtracted from his battle strength. While some did rejoin the army, they did not do so until after the engagement.

As far as the disagreement between American and British claims, it will probably never be possible to reconcile them. No doubt Greene, Col. Henry Lee, and others hoped to put the battle in the best light, especially given the dubious outcome and high casualties they suffered. Stewart likely felt the same way with respect to his report to his superiors.

The British lost more men to capture than at any other point in the southern campaign, save for the battle at Cowpens (where more than eight hundred were taken by Gen. Daniel Morgan’s army). The loss of so many fighting men at a time when the British were spread thin in defending South Carolina was a serious blow, to be followed the following month by Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

Looting the Camp

Perhaps the most enduring issue is the looting by the Continental troops at the battle’s climax. Has it been exaggerated, or did contemporaries downplay it? Greene does not refer to it at all. Lee alludes to it, but only Col. Otho Williams’s account makes much of this aspect of the affair. Out of more than one hundred accounts by battle participants examined during research for this work, only two Americans mention the looting: Williams and Lt. Col. Samuel Hammond. No British accounts refer to the enemy’s plundering the camp, a significant point since it was their camp in question and the looting supposedly saved their army at the point of collapse.

The first generation of historians to write about Eutaw Springs, which includes William Johnson and David Schenck, placed the blame for Greene’s army’s coming up short on the looting. Lee’s son, Henry Jr., insisted in his account of the battle, The Campaign of 1781 in the Carolinas (1824), that the looting of the camp was proof of American victory following the retreat of the British and the camp’s capture. Johnson, apparently with Williams’s account as his source, wrote in his Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene (1822) that the men, thinking the victory secure, and bent on the immediate fruition of its advantages, dispersed among the tents, fated upon the liquor and refreshments they afforded, and became utterly unmanageable. According to Otho H. Williams, the camp presented many objects to tempt a thirsty, naked and fatigued soldiery. Lee Jr. and Johnson both assigned greater blame to the looting for the American retreat than did the participants.³

With the publication of these two antebellum works, the dominance of the looting in the battle’s story was established. Nearly every subsequent history of the battle has accepted and repeated it. The looting did occur, but only in combination with other factors did it lead to the American retreat.

Henry Lee’s Actions

Colonel Lee’s audacious cavalry charge and his whereabouts on the battlefield also raised questions, both then and now. Lee was an energetic, aggressive cavalry commander who never shrank from action. At more than two centuries’ remove and with only clouded memories and agenda-driven accounts for documentation, it is difficult to understand his actions that day. This was a not a simple back-and-forth battle: the fighting was confused in his sector, and various small units performed numerous complex maneuvers.

Henry Lee Jr. made an interesting argument in defense of his father. The battle’s actions had been misunderstood, he claimed; Colonel Lee acted appropriately. The younger Lee accused Johnson of attacking his father’s character following the colonel’s death in 1818. The elder Lee had fallen on hard times, accumulating debt, suffering from ill health, and facing political ostracism for opposing the War of 1812. Johnson’s work, Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene (1822), has affected every account of the battle written since its publication.

Lee Jr. wrote a scathing rebuttal to Johnson’s work, which he claimed to be sinister and written with malice.⁴ In a section of The Campaign of 1781 stretching over fifty pages, he argued that Greene approved of his father’s actions and that Colonel Lee’s dragoons acted appropriately during the battle. According to him, Greene’s aide Nathaniel Pendleton delivered an order for the cavalry to attack Coffin on the British left flank. Pendleton could not find Lee, who was with his legion infantry, and delivered the order to the only officer he could find, Maj. Joseph Eggleston. This troop of cavalry charged and was repulsed.

In the meantime Lee arrived and ascertained that the time was at hand to charge the British. Upon organizing the assault, however, he discovered Eggleston’s troops were not ready, having already assaulted and failed. The younger Lee argued that Johnson faulted Lee for not being in place at the time the order arrived from Greene. As Lee Jr. pointed out in The Campaign of 1781, though, the commanding general who had placed Colonel Lee in charge of his legion infantry never indicated any disappointment in his officer’s conduct during the battle. Pendleton did not make enough of an effort to find Lee, in Henry Lee Jr.’s assessment.

Furthermore the younger Lee blamed Johnson for creating the myth that the looting of the British camp was the reason for the American withdrawal. He asserted that the little incident Greene referred to as preventing him from gaining complete victory was not the pillaging of the camp but the confusion among the cavalry at the battle’s climax.⁵ Indeed the possession and pillage of the enemy’s camp is the best proof, generally, of their defeat; nor has its plunder, after a hard fought action, been deemed either disgraceful or disastrous.⁶ Lee felt that Greene’s reference to an incident was not the looting of the camp but Pendleton’s mistake in not finding Colonel Lee to direct him to organize an effective cavalry charge.

This point is important, for while Johnson’s early history has colored all subsequent interpretations of the battle, Lee’s argument is worth considering. Looting no doubt did occur, and it caused confusion in the Maryland ranks. Yet this alone was not the cause of the Americans’ failure to break through at the house, and it seems apparent that Greene did not think so, either. The looting, along with other factors such as exhaustion, heat, a strong British position, and a counterattack led by Sheridan, Marjoribanks, and Stewart, saved the day for the English. It seems, as per Henry Lee Jr., that this combination of factors is what Greene was referring to when he mentioned the incident in his letters.⁷

Otho Williams also blamed the English defensive position at the house for the Americans’ failure to win the battle. He wrote that the Enemy were defeated and obliged to retire to their camp which had the advantage of a large Brick House in which many of them found refuge from our fire and annoyed us from the windows which circumstances alone saved them from a total Rout, and in all probability, the whole of them from being made Prisoners.⁸

Samuel Hammond insisted in his postwar writings that he and Lee had an arrangement that if the opportunity presented itself and Hammond charged, Lee would support him. He writes that this was the sole cause of preserving the British army from total defeat.… if the troops which had already surrendered, and been taken off and passed in the rear of the Virginia Brigade, and those troops supported by the Cavalry of the Legion … the brick house also would have been passed in our rear with out loss and our force would have fallen heavily upon the rear and the left flank of the enemy.⁹

As with many other battles, the postwar controversies create their own layers of history that later readers must sift through to understand the original events.

The Battlefield Is Underwater

An important misconception that we hope to address in this work concerns the battlefield itself. Ever since the flooding of the Santee River in 1940, most writers have assumed that the waters of Lake Marion covered the battlefield. Our research, and recent work by others, show that this is not so.

Comparing a preflood topographical map with a modern map reveals that the county boundary between Orangeburg and Clarendon did not change with the flooding. The two maps together reveal that the lake waters filled the streambed of Eutaw Creek but did not overflow onto the higher ground above, where the battle took place. The fringe along the creek and the springs themselves were inundated. Most of the battlefield—95 percent—remains on dry ground. While the waters of Lake Marion did not destroy the battle site, however, development has. The majority of the battlefield is covered by a modern neighborhood largely built in the 1960s. Recent archaeology, aided by information from relic hunters, has located the Brick House foundations and identified the location of battle actions from artifacts.

Sources

With a little digging, we discovered more information on the battle than we initially expected. A great deal was written in the early nineteenth century. This secondary scholarship formed the basis for how most historians understood the battle, even up to the Bicentennial years and the 1980s and 1990s. We decided to bypass these works temporarily and begin with the primary sources. After developing an account of the actions based on the accounts of participants, we consulted the nineteenth-century works to see how they summarized, edited, and altered